Young Rewired State 2011

Last week I attended Young Rewired State – a week long event for young coders to “hack” government data. Fourteen groups across the country consisting of developers assisted by mentors created some sort of web site or application using at least one set of government data.

I was supposed to be mentoring at an event in Reading as QA Apprenticeships (my employer) were sponsoring the event. This didn't come off, but I did attend the final afternoon – a show and tell event held at Microsoft in Victoria. Apart from the hassle of going into London on a hot day and the event going on a bit (there were lots of two and four minute presentations due to the number of people), I found some of the presentations showed some creativity and a few technically impressed.

The ones that stood out to me were:

Urbani – Pedestrian Heat Map

This was by a team in Guildford showing the busiest pedestrian areas in London. Promoted by the team for people to avoid the Olympics (interesting idea to concentrate on the negative!) but generally to allow people to get to where you want to go efficiently. I was unsure of this one as it had people transmit their locations using their mobile devices (the assumption being it would be anonymous) but I am sure that ways of approximating this information, e.g. mobile operator’s data for how many phones registered at each mast.

Not sure this team actually really used government data, but the heat maps looked interesting. I think that this app reached out to me because a visit to London can be quite stressful (it took me nearly an hour on the tube from Victoria to Paddington – could have walked it quicker!).

Train projects – Where’s my train? and TrainTrackr

These two projects were similar (but different) dealing with live information for train arrivals, departures and punctuality. The latter project uses the iPhones inbuilt location information to track your journey and the former tries to use the National Rail enquiries information. Visually they were great, although I've been a First Great Western train where on the seats with the small TV’s on the seat front had a train tracker (for the train your are on) which showed you where you were.

I think a couple of major points were made by the teams – firstly the definition of late used by the train operators may differ from what they think late is. And secondly that the data from National Rail wasn’t that easy to use – I would have hoped that you could at least of got hold of train routes, timetables and exact arrival/departure times at each station. Some nice static data you can manipulate. But no, I looked – the Office of Rail Regulation gives access to statistics. But they are trends and calculated from the data. I couldn't find it – although I’ll keep looking.

Where’s My Train won the "Best example of Coding prize" and TrainTrackr won the "Best Mobile prize" and Urbani the "Most Likely to be bought" prize.

I won’t call them negatives, more not totally positive points in my observance of the event.

There were a lot of Apple MacBook devices around being used for development. I'm probably a little biased having developed on Unix and Windows for all my working life, although I know of one friend who does all him development on Apple kit (although then hosted in a Linux environment). Maybe Apple should get into server technologies allowing you to build, test and host in the same environment.

You could see the talent on display – there were a number of very confident individuals presenting with thorough belief in their abilities and the code they have produced. But how do we get them into industry.

There are two points I can make here. Some of the youngsters I have trained in the QA apprenticeship and those on display at YRS are talented. The problem (and this is a good problem to have) is how to help these confident people on moving from the self taught programming skills to professionally deliver but at the same time handling the confidence that can sometimes come over as arrogance (believe me a problem levelled at me over the last 20 years!). Any sort of advice given can sometimes be seen as criticism.

Linking to this is my second point. QA and I were there to promote and discuss apprenticeships with those people attending. We offer software development apprenticeships to young people – to get them into the industry. QA gave a presentation that I think was very positive – we currently have vacancies with employers to fill for the group I am training starting next month. One point made was that going to university isn't about getting a job – although, I know when I went to do a degree it was definitely to get a job. There was a little negative twitter reaction, I think mostly from the most confident developers. It could just be the word apprenticeship that is off putting to some of the talented developers – they want the big bucks and they want it now!

The point is how do we get these people into jobs? There was a judge who talked about start ups and private equity, and I have no doubt some of these developers could (and may) go down that route. One of my best friends started up a business whilst doing a degree (which I ended up working for) – and he took that risk and it worked for him - it doesn't always. However, that route isn't available for everyone, nor right for everyone. An entrepreneur is a special or different type of person. I wish I had an opportunity when I was younger, I think I had the abilities, but my finances didn't allow me to take this route (and I possibly wasn't experienced or brave enough).

The other options that I see are university, degree and a graduate programme (you don’t get a lot of software development training or experience on a computing degree), finding an employer who is willing to invest in that individual. Or via a route like a work based (i.e. employed) apprenticeship.

It was quite fun to watch some of these project presentations – a number were predictable (trains tracking, university searching, broadband availability, NHS, Solar) and some were unique (MoodMap, Lifestyle, Snackomics, Beachwall).  And the teams seemed to have worked hard (and have been pizza filled). As a C# developer I would have liked to have seen more development on display, but quite difficult in a presentation of two minutes!